Maybe I'm just getting old but I've never understood the whole RGB/Gaming Case scene, 90% of the use cases of something like this involve it being sat under a desk in room nobody but the owner sees, and that owner spends their time fixated on a screen. Additionally any bragging rights are lost because who believes what's said on in game chat "I'm not hacking honest!"

It's one of the few industries where this kind of thing makes no sense, if I buy a sports car the bragging rights are immediately applicable when I pull it off my drive. If I buy expensive clothes, when I walk down the street heads may turn.

When a "l33t" gamer buys a all singing all dancing PC full of lights and faux carbon fibre it ends usually ends up in their mums basement and if they're very lucky they might have a living breathing non-digital friend who will see it once in a blue moon.

Mount everything in a cardboard box and slash the price in half and the use result is the same.

"Designed to intimidate enemies," according to Acer, the Orion 9000 has one of the most extreme l33t gamer designs I've seen in some time, with aggressive angles, vents, and enough RBG lighting to blind even the most the hardened of PC gamers.

Or, Acer's embraced to the industry's worst impulses trying to market to this demographic. I've never understood the ostentatious angular RGB LED "gamer" aesthetic, particularly on a premium product like this. Do the folks spending $3k on a pre-built gaming rig really want something that looks so tacky?

Jesus. If you want to "intimidate enemies", might I suggest a stick with a nail in it?

Whoa there, pardner. The big guns like that should be saved for something like an alien invasion, don't you think? Otherwise we'll make bigger boards and bigger nails. Soon we'll make a board with a nail so big it will destroy us all!

With the zillion thread CPU and how games struggle with multi-GPU setups, it'd be interesting to see if running 4 simultaneous instances of the same game on one GPU each would result in similar framerates to one instance running on 4 GPUS.

"Designed to intimidate enemies," according to Acer, the Orion 9000 has one of the most extreme l33t gamer designs I've seen in some time, with aggressive angles, vents, and enough RBG lighting to blind even the most the hardened of PC gamers.

Or, Acer's embraced to the industry's worst impulses trying to market to this demographic. I've never understood the ostentatious angular RGB LED "gamer" aesthetic, particularly on a premium product like this. Do the folks spending $3k on a pre-built gaming rig really want something that looks so tacky?

I can't speak for everyone, but as a 30 year old PC gamer I disable every LED I can internally and everything external is sleek rather than aggressive.

Jesus. If you want to "intimidate enemies", might I suggest a stick with a nail in it?

Seriously, how many games demand eighteen cores and four GPUs? That's not a gaming PC, it's a compact render farm.

Future fit. And you can use to mine bitcoins in the spare time!..

Something like that should be good enough for ~ 5 years. The monitor might have to be upgraded in 2 years to 4k which should be enough of a challenge for those 4 Vega cards if you're hoping to run the latest games on ultra at 100-200 fps.Unless miniaturization brings along a light 2x4k VR set..

"Designed to intimidate enemies," according to Acer, the Orion 9000 has one of the most extreme l33t gamer designs I've seen in some time, with aggressive angles, vents, and enough RBG lighting to blind even the most the hardened of PC gamers.

Or, Acer's embraced to the industry's worst impulses trying to market to this demographic. I've never understood the ostentatious angular RGB LED "gamer" aesthetic, particularly on a premium product like this. Do the folks spending $3k on a pre-built gaming rig really want something that looks so tacky?

Maybe I'm just getting old but I've never understood the whole RGB/Gaming Case scene, 90% of the use cases of something like this involve it being sat under a desk in room nobody but the owner sees, and that owner spends their time fixated on a screen.

Why anyone would pay real American money for an Intel HEDT CPU is beyond me. Threadripper will beat even the 7980X because of higher base clock and all core turbo. God forbid AMD releases a 16 core 4.0 GHz 1990X.

When I think of people buying 18 cores, that's not exactly the visual aesthetic I think of, suffice to say, heh.

*Optimistically* anything past 6 fast cores gets moot for games, the current execution window sweet spot is more like ~3 cores on average. Even with high quality streaming in the background 6 cores takes no hits. So hopefully people buy this for more than games...

Maybe I'm just getting old but I've never understood the whole RGB/Gaming Case scene, 90% of the use cases of something like this involve it being sat under a desk in room nobody but the owner sees, and that owner spends their time fixated on a screen. Additionally any bragging rights are lost because who believes what's said on in game chat "I'm not hacking honest!"

It's one of the few industries where this kind of thing makes no sense, if I buy a sports car the bragging rights are immediately applicable when I pull it off my drive. If I buy expensive clothes, when I walk down the street heads may turn.

When a "l33t" gamer buys a all singing all dancing PC full of lights and faux carbon fibre it ends usually ends up in their mums basement and if they're very lucky they might have a living breathing non-digital friend who will see it once in a blue moon.

Mount everything in a cardboard box and slash the price in half and the use result is the same.

It may not apply here, because a doubt anyone buying this would do their own upgrades. But you generally get a gamer case because they are really easy to install components. Removable trays to hold the hard-drives, ample space, extra locations for fans make for an easy build. The LED are just a little bling added in.

Jesus. If you want to "intimidate enemies", might I suggest a stick with a nail in it?

Seriously, how many games demand eighteen cores and four GPUs? That's not a gaming PC, it's a compact render farm.

Just an FYI, just because games don't DEMAND 18 cores, doesn't mean they don't USE 18 cores. People really don't seem to understand this. I recently purchased a Threadripper 1950X, and I was surprised at the number of games that utilize all the cores. PUBG is a perfect example. I went from 60-80fps on my 2600k to over 100-150 FPS EVEN DURING THE INITIAL WAIT. Max Details, 1440p.

That being said, I purchased TR for other reasons, but I happen to know that TR walks all over the 7980XE.

Why anyone would pay real American money for an Intel HEDT CPU is beyond me. Threadripper will beat even the 7980X because of higher base clock and all core turbo. God forbid AMD releases a 16 core 4.0 GHz 1990X.

What's funny is that I can hit 4.2GHz pretty easily with my 1950X. This tells me that AMD still has some headroom to compete should the need arise.

One possible real market for a beast like this is the production teams for live eSports streaming. The CS:GO players play at 1024x768 (according to teamliquid.com, see for example http://wiki.teamliquid.net/counterstrike/Olofmeister) but the streams are 1080p because they're rendered by the observers' machines rather than the players'. Generating, capturing and streaming the high-quality renders off the observers' machines and then doing post-processing to add overlays or what-have-you seems like it could be pretty demanding?

Would love to hear from someone on the inside if they're reading this.

44 lanes of cpu, 64 lanes of gpu... Or am i sucking at math/specs today?

GPUs won't be running 16x, probably more likely 8/8/8/8, but your point still stands - you're gobbling up PCIe lanes and not leaving much for NVMe (or anything else for that matter).

That's what I was thinking, I just wasn't terribly sure I was picturing that right.

If there were only something like a 24c/48t CPU option with a whack-load of lanes at half that price... Man that would be great.

Intel are notorious for hobbling things like PCI lanes for the sake of product differentiation. Their entire portfolio has become an absolute nightmare for anyone that doesn't have a technical background.

Maybe I'm just getting old but I've never understood the whole RGB/Gaming Case scene, 90% of the use cases of something like this involve it being sat under a desk in room nobody but the owner sees, and that owner spends their time fixated on a screen. Additionally any bragging rights are lost because who believes what's said on in game chat "I'm not hacking honest!"

It's one of the few industries where this kind of thing makes no sense, if I buy a sports car the bragging rights are immediately applicable when I pull it off my drive. If I buy expensive clothes, when I walk down the street heads may turn.

When a "l33t" gamer buys a all singing all dancing PC full of lights and faux carbon fibre it ends usually ends up in their mums basement and if they're very lucky they might have a living breathing non-digital friend who will see it once in a blue moon.

Mount everything in a cardboard box and slash the price in half and the use result is the same.

I'd say it comes down to this nebulous thing of "What you enjoy." And what more justification is needed beyond that?

Someone could enjoy putting together model airplanes and then stuff them in a box and never look at them again. What's the point in that?

One possible real market for a beast like this is the production teams for live eSports streaming. The CS:GO players play at 1024x768 (according to teamliquid.com, see for example http://wiki.teamliquid.net/counterstrike/Olofmeister) but the streams are 1080p because they're rendered by the observers' machines rather than the players'. Generating, capturing and streaming the high-quality renders off the observers' machines and then doing post-processing to add overlays or what-have-you seems like it could be pretty demanding?

Would love to hear from someone on the inside if they're reading this.

It's nothing that an 8 core CPU and single solid GPU couldn't handle. 4 GPU's is pointless unless you just demand the best Futuremark performance money can buy without going LN2. The scaling beyond 2 GPU's is terrible. And there isn't a game today that will actually leverage an 18 core CPU. There's no reason for something like that unless you're doing serious video editing, want a single case render farm, or doing high level scientific/mathematical workloads.

Looking at these specs, words like "needless" and "superfluous" keep popping into my head when I think of it as a gaming box. I mean, having all those extra threads that will never get used seems goofy and wasteful.

I mean, what're you gonna do? Run a bunch of VMs for games? Is that even feasible? Even if it was, would it not be far more economical to simply buy (or build) a bunch of more modest gaming boxes? Especially since this silly thing has got to be priced at $8k minimum. You could probably buy 3 beastial (or build probably 4-5) gaming boxes for the same price.

The Intel Core i9-7980XE has a TDP of 140W - and with overclocking I'm guessing it goes far higher - but they only put a single 120mm radiator on it? I mean it's doable, but it's either 60mm thick or they move so much air across it you can't hear your games.

What's up with the references to RBG lighting? Is that a UK thing? I've always known it as RGB (Red, Green, Blue). A quick google of RGB brings up the Red, Blue, Green system. Googling RBG brings up Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Curious, is that a European thing or a typo? Comments all use RGB unless it's a quote from the article referencing RBG.

What's up with the references to RBG lighting? Is that a UK thing? I've always known it as RGB (Red, Green, Blue). A quick google of RGB brings up the Red, Blue, Green system. Googling RBG brings up Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Curious, is that a European thing or a typo? Comments all use RGB unless it's a quote from the article referencing RBG.